Workplace Gamification: Fun or Dystopian?

Adrian Hon joins the program to discuss his book "You've Been Played". In the book, he talks about how employers are attempting to make the workplace more engaging and fun for workers but subsequently create an invasive worker-tracking system.

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Check out more from the MR crew:

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The term gamification, how do you broadly Define it as something that's taken over so many sectors over the past few decades? I mean rating Uber drivers is an example that you give right off the bat but to start more broadly how do you define that term. yeah, I mean gamification is pretty broad. It basically means using ideas from game design from video games and non-game purposes. so maybe using ideas like badges points missions levels Quests for Education you know? for the workplace. for Fitness. all sorts of things. so it's pretty broad but I think a lot of people when they see it recognize it. and yeah so there are some Hallmarks of it: achievement points, right stars, or I guess different things you can accumulate, all that kind of stuff. and I mean how is this in any way really different at least from the workplace side from a traditional performance review. yeah I mean you know workplaces factories you know a lot of Institutions have always wanted to monitor workers' performance. You know over the years that's not a new thing, it's been around for centuries if not Millennia. And they've always had some way of rewarding or punishing workers for their performance. so in that respect, it's not new. I think that's kind of two things that have really changed in the last 10 to 20 years. The first part is that the level of monitoring is just much more detailed and just completely non-stop compared to the Past. right it might be that you are rated on your output over a day you know they just count up how much work you know how many pieces you've completed in a day. Now if you work at Amazon, if you work at Uber, a lot of companies call centers can monitor your performance down to the second. and they can see you know literally where you're moving and what things you're clicking. so that's kind of being of the Modern View. and I think what's interesting about gamification is how they feedback on your performance. so it used to be in the past you know you get a little letter in the mail saying you need to work harder otherwise you're fired. what a manager might come up to you you know and have a chat with you. and now increasingly we're seeing that kind of feedback from bosses and management come in the form of a game. where it will say look you've sat down on this leadership board or you haven't gotten these achievements or you have got these achievements you're you're outperforming people on the factory floor. you've completed these quests and so now You Can level up.